


The Myth of Fingerprints

by kaydeefalls



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Torchwood
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, F/M, Introspection, M/M, Multi, Multiple Partners, Post-Canon, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-23
Updated: 2010-03-23
Packaged: 2017-10-08 06:28:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/73673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaydeefalls/pseuds/kaydeefalls
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack maps out the universe in echoes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Myth of Fingerprints

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Quinn for the beta. Spoilers through "End of Time" and "Children of Earth".

Jack maps out the universe in echoes.

He's hardly the first to do so. On Earth, there are (were, will be) several species collectively known as bats who inhabit personal galaxies of reflected sound. The echoes of their own vocalizations, bouncing off objects in space, guide them through their world more thoroughly than sight, more efficiently than touch. On the planet Andovar in the Cyjiak system, a species of empaths called the ghitani measure physical space in the memories of organisms that passed through before. Jack dwells on Andovar for half a decade, and many ghitani recoil from the paths he treads across their world.

Others linger enthralled in the echoes of his footprints.

*

The last time he owns a proper bed is the enormous four-poster he installs in his rented flat during World War II. Estelle laughs, delighted by the expanse of it. She sprawls across the king-sized mattress in just her slip and stockings, afternoon light spilling like honey across her skin, and spins tales of sprites and fancies as Jack kisses his way down her lithe body.

After Estelle, any bed always feels far too large, too empty without her warm curves and enchanting laugh. The camp bed in the room under Jack's office is too small for two, too uncomfortable for memories tinged in golden sunlight. He prefers it that way.

And then Ianto slips in, unprepossessing and oddly inevitable. He carves out a niche for himself where he can and never asks for more than Jack can give, but is just always _there_, until there's nowhere else Jack can imagine him being. Camp beds were made for common soldiers, enlisted men; maybe that's why Ianto is so suited to it. He's the conscript, the unexpected soldier. In another era, he would have worn the uniform with pride and died in it on a battlefield in France, gasping from the gas.

In the narrow berth of his cabin in the cruiser taking him away from Earth for the last time (promises, promises), Jack finds himself instinctively pressing his back to the sloped wall, curving his body around the unfilled space and pressing his lips to the imagined nape of Ianto's neck. He doesn't sleep that night.

*

Danil and Ashanti, perpetually just passing through, become drawn into his orbit more or less accidentally. The third time their ship nicks him out of a tight situation on an unforgiving moon, Ashanti rolls her eyes and tells Jack that since he can't seem to stay out of trouble for half a Nionian month at a time, she's going to have to lock him in their hold to keep an eye on him. Danil grins and suggests handcuffs.

The lock and key aren't necessary, as it turns out -- well, except for the _really_ fun nights.

It's a relief to not have to be alone at the center of someone else's personal universe. Danil and Ashanti are a law unto themselves, and for now, it's Jack who's just along for the ride. Rose and the Doctor live on in Danil's infectious smile and Ashanti sharp sarcasm, so gorgeous together that Jack could spend a lifetime just standing back and watching their eternal waltz. They exchange glances over his head like Ianto and Gwen, wry and affectionate, and drag him along from planet to planet with Estelle's boundless curiosity, Alonso's assured touch at the helm.

Sometimes it's best with three.

"Straight on 'til morning," Danil says, his eyes crinkling with laughter and hand warm on Jack's arm, and Jack presses a kiss to Ashanti's temple and lets them lead.

*

A forgotten corner of a galaxy is settled by humankind in the 23rd century and erupts into civil war in the 26th. Jack has never been able to resist a noble cause, however doomed by the unforgiving annals of the Time Agency academy's history vids, and so he signs up to run recon missions between worlds in the outer reaches of those star systems. It's a just war, and an ugly one.

His ship is shot down over Verbena and he takes up arms alongside the local ground forces. Jack has fought in too many wars, or perhaps he's just fighting the same one over and over and over again. His pilot is badly wounded in the crash, and the medic removes the shrapnel from her spine with Owen's grim determination. A bride kisses her new wife goodbye before a battle with Lucia's clear-eyed courage, and the stubborn set of Rose's jaw can be traced in the profile of a young man tracking enemy aircraft. And always, always, Stephen and Grey stare plaintively out at him from the soft-cheeked faces of soldiers who grow younger with every war.

Derrek Alleyne is a would-be rancher from a career military family, raised on a series of ships and wanting nothing more than to settle on real earth somewhere. His older sisters joined up as soon as they attained their majority, but he resisted until his parents were killed in the first wave of attacks. One sister has been MIA, presumed dead, for months; he hasn't seen the other since her unit became entrenched in a valley on the planet Hera. Derrek is russet-skinned and slender, with a ready smile but guarded eyes, and Ianto is there in every economical gesture, in the startled warmth of his touch. He befriends Jack immediately after the crash and takes him to bed after the first enemy assault leaves their unit thoroughly bedraggled. But they held the line.

When Jack kisses him, Derrek tastes of soil and starlight.

Neither of them were ever going to survive this war.

*

Alonso travels with him for a time, experiencing the wonders and horrors of the universe. He's a better pilot than the Doctor ever was (though his ship is no TARDIS), and just as bloody-minded as Gwen on a do-gooder tear. But he's not Torchwood. After a few years, he decides he's had enough -- that it's time to hang up his hat and let someone else take over saving the world for a change. And he invites Jack home with him.

Much to his own surprise, Jack says yes.

Alonso has the lifetime Ianto should have had. Jack never begrudges him it. It's dull and ordinary and exactly what Jack never realized he needed. It's so rare, to meet the right person at the right time; they bicker and spend too many evenings at the pub and he watches Alonso's hair turn gray.

This was a gift he should never have been given, but it's hard to resent Alonso's firm muscles and surprisingly shy smile.

*

Sometimes years, decades will pass with Jack remaining alone. Sometimes he thinks that to be alone is the only choice he has left. The weight of thousands of years of dirt settles over his unmarked grave, and it feels like the suffocating emptiness of the spaces where others have been. Grey's eyes are dark in the shadows of cliffs under a distant star and Rose's small form is swallowed up in a refugee camp on Raxicoricofallipatorious; Estelle's fairies lurk in the forests of Andromeda and Alice stares accusingly out at him from the harem of a duke of Saliatev.

Jack aims his pistol at the middle head of a slave trader in Sector 11, and hears the echoes of Ianto's futile gunshots ringing out beside him.

That's where the Doctor finds him. He helps Jack overthrow the slaveholding empire with a manic grin and only a cursory grimace at the pistol still clenched tightly in Jack's hand.

This latest regeneration is narrow-faced and ginger, with fine crows' feet fanning out from the corners of his ice-blue eyes. He has the razor-edged sarcasm of Jack's first Doctor and the coiled-spring energy of the pinstriped incarnation; the goofy, almost childlike wonder of the previous version paired with a weary gravity that all the Doctors have always shared.

The Doctor is only ever echoes of himself. It makes him easier to bear, sometimes.

"Traveling alone?" Jack asks, once it's all sorted and he's taking a breather on the TARDIS. The console room hums emptily with the ghosts of companions no longer present.

The Doctor moves restlessly about the console without touching anything. This incarnation tends to keep his hands shoved deep in the overlarge pockets of his drooping cardigan, like an absent-minded professor. "Aren't we all? Anyway, it's only for a time. Someone else always comes along."

"That must be nice," Jack says wearily. "To be able to just…shed your skin and move on."

"I'm just emulating your species, really," the Doctor says with a shrug and half a grin. "That's what's so brilliant about humanity, the constant adaptability, changing form without ever needing to try on a brand new face. We all do it. Even you."

Jack lets out a short bark of laughter. "Haven't you heard? I'm a fixed point. I'll never change."

But the Doctor shakes his head, pale eyes intent on Jack's face. "You're something new," he murmurs. "Something better. Fill the spaces, Jack. It's all anyone can ever do."

Something inside of Jack stirs, a sharp ache, like the phantom limbs of people he hasn't loved yet. When he moves on again, a part of him wonders how many of his selves linger on in this space, bumping elbows with Rose and Mickey and Martha and Donna and Sarah Jane and Amy and all the others he never met, while the Doctor edges through the empty shell of the TARDIS alone.

*

Jack never expected to be a father. Lucia keeps it to herself as long as she can, but only a blind man could miss the soft curve of her belly, the flush in her cheeks. She's gorgeous like this, in the way of all pregnant women everywhere; she shoots him a sly sidelong glance and presses him up against the conference room table when the rest of the team is out on a mission, and the yeses tumble from his lips unbidden.

He never expected to _want_ to be a father, but there she is, tiny and perfect, with Lucia's rose petal lips and his own blue eyes. She'll grow up to be a real stunner, Jack thinks -- with these parents, how could she not? -- unbending and proud. He wonders if he can instill in her some of Estelle's sweetness, Rose's mischief, the Doctor's cleverness; Gerald's calm authority and Harriet's persistent curiosity.

May she have his own eternal capacity for dodging his way out of trouble, but none of the accompanying loss.

And when Lucia vanishes with their daughter into the government's protection program, he thinks maybe Alice will inherit her mother's ironclad common sense, along with everything else -- that determined pragmatism superseding all other desires. Keeping them _safe_ against all odds.

He can only hope.

*

After the war (they're all the same, the wars -- he doesn't distinguish one from another anymore), Jack hops into a dying ship's escape pod and lets it deposit him where it will.

It does.

Yolena is a gentle girl from a peaceful world who has never been forced to discover the steel at her core, and Jack loves her for her undimmed innocence. She is all the shades of the people who might have been: Alice unburdened by dangerous parents, Martha never forced to walk the Earth for a year-that-never-happened, Alonso's taut abdomen unmarred by the bullet scar, Derrek with the plot of earth he never had the chance to tend. She smiles with unguarded joy when Jack strokes the nape of her neck, and moves against him without the urgency of tarnished desire, of love lost and never fully won again.

He will not be the one to break her. Yolena is finely spun glass, beautiful and fragile, and he cradles her delicately in the circle of his arms. It takes him years to understand: she's the one who has always been gentle with _him_, keeping him grounded with her unprepossessing certainty of self.

The realization is almost humbling. He lets her hold him upright for all the time she has, unexpected and freely given grace.

*

He makes planetfall for the first time in several decades on a moon in the Orion system, and is suitably entranced by the local color. Until, of course, he realizes that they're in the midst of a trade war with several far less entrancing species in that sector.

Jack's fought this battle too many times already. When he's inevitably accused of espionage (by virtue of his species -- humanity is allied with the enemy Pylorans in this century), one of the locals shows surprising initiative and smuggles him off-planet in a New New York minute.

Aazya is resourceful and clever, and just a bit sneaky. Jack likes zir immensely. Ze would've been right at home on the TARDIS, stirring up trouble, or getting Torchwood out of countless tight spots. Ze has Rose's boundless love of life and Ashanti's sly humor, Alonso's lithe athleticism and Lucia's pragmatism and calculating mind. They tumble into bed together like a whirlwind, like a last chance.

"Am I the love of your life, then?" ze asks, with a studied nonchalance so like Ianto's it makes Jack's breath catch in his throat.

He's lived so many lives.

"Yes," he says, because it's the perfect truth: they all are, every one.

*

Even Jack expected to forget, eventually. But as the centuries pass into millennia and beyond, he finds himself gradually slowing down in counterpoint to the memories he accumulates.

He remembers everyone.

His world is steeped in the detritus of a thousand thousand lifetimes. He navigates his path through the stars in the echoes of the people who passed alongside him, before and then and now and in times to come. He sees Alice's unbending neck in the arch of the hohaka tree on Galatea, traces the warmth of Grey's fingertips in the sun-baked pebbles of a beach in the Kyrtonian Nebula. Sand dunes swell with the curve of Lucia's pregnant belly, a potter shapes russet-toned clay into the smooth slope of Derrek's hands, and a passing Crespallion couple bicker with Ashanti and Danil's teasing tenderness. Ianto's unexpected laugh echoes in the back of a transport galley, Rose's enthusiasm shines out of a revolutionary pamphlet left on a café table, and Aazya's cool calculation is reflected in the eyes of a friendly local smuggler. Alonso pilots every cruiser, Estelle laughs delightedly at every new planetary custom, and Jack can see the gentle arc of Yolena's lips along every horizon.

The universe sings the stories of all the lives he's ever touched, all the love he's been given and allowed to return, the startling absolution. It spills over him in endless waves, with every new life, every new smile and voice and touch reflecting and building upon the vast firmament of his past. And somewhat to his surprise, the weight of it doesn't bury him. Instead, he settles with it, slowing, letting the worlds wash over and around him until he is perfectly still, putting down roots and inhabiting the universe of memory, filled to the brim with the spaces of those left behind.

The Face of Boe blinks, and sees a thousand thousand fingerprints upon the glass, never fading.

*

The young man straightens and pulls away, breath still warm against Jack's lips. He's too young -- young like Rose, with her mischievous smile and impulsive heart; young like Estelle, ready to believe anything and everything. He has some of Owen's sharp edges and Suzie's intensity, Toshiko's resourcefulness and Lucia's sly glances, and the Doctor's sarcasm tempered by a dry humor all his own.

All this, and the echo of a warm, firm body pressed close against his own. Jack never stood a chance.

As if he ever does.

_Jones, Ianto Jones_, Jack thinks, and smiles. Here comes trouble.

 

> _Because you can get free of everything except the space where things have been.  
> ('A Man Walks Into a Room', Nicole Krauss)_


End file.
